The Warmth

Supernatural Stories | Feb 20, 2012 | 8 min read
96 Votes, average: 4 out of 5
Last thing Eddie remembered was the party on campus.  Girls, booze, and music.  Couple guys hitting the drugs hard in the back room.  Marijuana joints burned like incense in cigarette trays.  He went there with a mission: get as trashed as possible before blacking out.  Hopefully wake up next to a topless girl the next morning with a video tape to relive the event, whether he remembered doing it or not didn't necessarily matter.

Lance hosted the party.  Lance was the guy who took every drug in the book.  Too young to realize his mortality and would most likely end up in an early grave (and ultimately did).  Eddie was a little different.  Pot was always fine, he'd have to get off a puff at least once a day.  Coke, if it was good, he'd have a shot or two.  Heroine was the stopping point though.  Coke gave him enough of a blitz to where he didn't much see the point of creating a cocktail with heroine being an ingredient.  But the only way he got Cocaine was when there was a distribution of sorts going on.  One line a head.  The psychedelics were few and far between.  Those were more so his stress-eases.  There was the occasional prescription he bummed off of a friend (or complete stranger - it didn't matter much who).  At the end of the day, OxyContin (or Oxycotton, according to Eddie), was his favorite.  But those came rarely and expensively.

He liked the girls redheaded and loose.  Not slutty, just loose.  As in would have sex with a stranger every now and again, but ultimately reserved the partying for the rare occasions.  The slutty was his bread-and-butter until he contracted gonorrhea from one.  Pissing razor wire and having to get a very painful injection of Bicillin C-R in the ass were two things that made him learn his lesson.  The nurses called the Bicillin C-R "Bootyjuice," it felt like he was being teased each time he heard that…  He probably was.
A nice, loose redhead that wouldn't want him to wait around the next morning was now his partiality.
He had made it with a cute slightly lascivious blonde, ended up spending that night rather well.  He didn't remember it though.  That's what the occasional video camera was for, but he would never find out if he set one up or not.  His only recollection of what happened with that girl would be yellow blurs and some dirty talk.
But he was dressed now.  Had a long-sleeve T-shirt on his chest with a small tear at the bottom.  Jeans.  Shoes.  And a hat laid in some leaves a couple of yards away.

When he opened his eyes, he was half out of it.  He shook away a psychosomatic hangover and got to his knees.  His eyes were dry, as was his mouth.  His nostrils burned with chapped air and his ears were red with the cold.  He blinked several times.  Right after the drowsiness had dissipated, he knew he wasn't where he was supposed to be.  It was outside somewhere.  He was laying face down on top of a small rivulet and it made a freezing inch-wide line of moisture run down his shirt and his left leg.  He kept his mouth open as he observed what was around him.  It hurt too much to breathe through his nose alone.
It was almost pitch black.  Some yellow moonlight had escaped through the trees and illuminated selected parts of the underbrush.  Eddie couldn't see past the medley of tenebrous branches that occluded any further sight.  The pupils of his eyes shifted size for a few seconds, and not in unison.  His head pounded.  He grabbed his head and held it tightly in his moist hands.  He didn't feel any injuries, just a horrible headache.  Only it wasn't a headache.  It was something else.  It was a concussion.  No doubt about that.  It explained the stilted eye-strain and memory loss.  He had one before.  He knew the feeling pretty well.  Only, he wasn't fatigued like he was last time.  Sure, he was dazed, but not fatigued.  His first concussion rendered him to a point where he could have laid down and slept through a war zone.
Didn't matter much now though.  It did, but not quite as much as being lost.  These woods felt unfriendly, malevolent even.  The humidity was overwhelming, almost to where it felt like Eddie was drowning exclusively in water vapor.

The stuffiness of the entire forest didn't do much to moisturize his orifices.  It still hurt like hell to breathe.
His eyes (or maybe just eye) adjusted to the darkness a bit better.  Didn't do much though.  Just trees.  Dead trees with dead leaves barely hanging on.  Most of the leaves littered the ground.  The pile Eddie was laying in had stuck to his shirt from being so heavy with moisture.  He forced his eyes to start watering.  Small droplets accumulated in the corners.  He spread the tears by rapidly blinking.  He could see a bit better now, but still nothing to see.
Suddenly, he felt an inclination to look behind him.  A cabin.  An old, moldy cabin in the middle of the woods.  The wood it was made of was dark and slightly wet.  It was smaller than a trailer and didn‘t look habitable, not for more than a short-while in any case.  A light shining through small openings in a boarded up window proved as such.  A fire was lit in there.  And that fire was being tended to.  It had to be.  The cabin seemed as if it was abandoned for years, and something just found it less than a week ago.  Spider webs hung nefariously in between the boards of the porch fence.  The steps leading onto the porch looked decrepit and rickety, as did most every board and nail that contributed to the creation of this hovel.
The cabin pulsated with enmity and ambiguity.  Eddie was like a bug staring into a Venus Flytrap.  There was something inside that wanted him.  Wanted him to come inside.  Come into the light that shined through a slightly boarded window.  To guard himself from the cold and wet weather and find safety in the warm fire stoked to perfection.

Eddie could feel it.  As much as he was tempted to march through the door and seek the help of whoever was tending the flame, a sixth-sense warned him.  What laid behind that door was no human.  It wasn't partial to socializing with humans either.  It was a malefic creature that held no good intentions for whoever should walk through that door.  What it would do to whoever went inside was still a mystery.
Eddie couldn't hear nor see it.  He was just aware.  He knew it.  He knew it like most children instinctively know that a fire is scalding to the touch.  Eddie wasn't smart, but he was smarter than a bug.  He knew that light would shock him; something flies and mosquitoes aren't aware of when they hover towards that blue light, entranced by it for some reason.
Eddie looked down and saw his legs inching closer and he forced himself to stop in his tracks.  He wanted inside badly.  He would die out here for sure.  Maybe it was just paranoia preventing him from going inside.  The concussion maybe?  No.  It wasn't.  That cabin is simply not to be approached.  Whatever is inside is not to be seen.
When standing in awe and fear of the cottage, he realized that his sight had come back in full.  His eyes were moist and working once more, even if the pupils were of different sizes, which Eddie was unaware of.
He licked his lips nervously.  He didn't want to put his back to the cabin.  He wanted to see what was all around him, but just as long as the cabin remained in sight.  As if taking his eyes off of it would result in him being swallowed up by the wooden shack.
He groaned and swiftly turned around, ignoring his fear.  He saw dots of light poking through the trees.  A town?  It had to have been a town.  The lights amassed so perfectly - like streetlights!
Like streetlights…  They weren't streetlights.  They were something else.  There were no streetlights beyond the jubilee of trees and brush.  Like the creature inside the cabin, Eddie knew that things weren't as he should have believed them to have been.  He wasn't in the same realm.  Nobody knocked him out and dumped him in the woods.  How he got here was a mystery that didn't matter as much as Eddie's survival.  He had to survive.  No sleeping on the way there.  Go forward and don't stop until you reach those lights.  Run, if you have to.  Just don't ever go backwards.  Don't ever go inside that cabin.  Don't ever even touch that cabin.  If you want to live don't go inside that God-forsaken cabin!

The warmth of the fire ushered him to come closer to the cabin.  He was so cold, freezing even.  He wanted inside.  But he wouldn't dare do so.  He compared it to selling his soul to the devil just for that bit of warmth in there.  Not even death would protect him from whatever that nameless thing would have done.
A cold wind blew from the lights.  He had to face the winds to make it.  He had to face the winds to survive.  He had to shut-out the warmth to… prevent something worse than death.
No more dawdling He thought.  He grabbed his hat that laid in the leaves.  It was soaking wet, so he rolled it up and put it in his back pocket.  When it dried, it would help.  It would help only a little bit, but it would help nonetheless.
He went towards the lights.  He traversed through the same wilderness.  No landmarks at all.  Wet leaves and mud sloshed under him with each footstep and stuck to his shoes.
It felt like days before he reached the end.  It was four hours before he got to the end of the forest.  He stood on top of a steep hill and saw what was producing the lights.  It was a town.  It looked like a town from long ago.  Cobblestone streets and everything.  The lights were candles.  How they burned bright enough for him to see past all that forest was a mystery.  They wanted him to come to the town.  But the town housed the same feeling as the cabin.  Eddie had to convince himself that was just in his mind.  It was paranoia.  It was… stupidity.  Sheer stupidity.  The town still seemed dark and brooding.  But the cabin was worse.  So much worse.  Looking back, Eddie realized he had never been so overwhelmed with pure malevolence before.
Eddie turned around to gaze at the forest one last time.  The light of the cabin shined.  But not like the lights of the town.  Eddie knew the lights of the town were far away when he first saw them.  The light of the cabin was past just a few yards of forest.  It was as if… It had followed him.  Coaxed him with warmth that he never felt.  Eddie kept wanting to look back as he made his way through the forest… It had to have been the cabin's doing.  The cabin was luring him in.

Eddie's eyes watered with fear for the first time.  He had to have been wrong.  The light… It was so close.  It seemed just a short walk back to the cabin.  Three yards at the most.  He shook the desire away.  Even if it was a few yards away, then what?  You would just turn around and head right back to town.  Leave it behind.  Leave it behind if you don't want to face whatever's inside.
Eddie faced the town again.  From the hilltop, Eddie guessed it was about a mile away.  Just a mile.  Past a field of short dark grass.  Then the town will surround him.
While Eddie was afraid of the town, he had no choice but to approach it.  To his left on the hilltop was a line of forestry farther than the eye could see; same with the right.  That town was the closest thing to civilization in sight.  He could go left, he could go right.  But he won't.  He was as good as dead if he did so.  If he went backwards, he was dead and then some.  No human mind could fathom what awaited him in that cabin.  The town was just a mystery.  The town was a haunting mystery that Eddie would have to brave.  He would have to make it.
He sighed and went down the hill, towards the town again.  The cold wind continued to blow, and he could feel the warmth of the cabin on his back.  But he never looked behind him.  He kept his eyes forward and made his way to that mysterious town.

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Shaun Adams Feb 20, 2012

Hi there, I enjoyed reading your story. The suspense building is excellent as is the use of language, in the end though I was left feeling a little disappointed. Maybe I missed the point ( I hope not)nothing is resolved, how did he get there? what is in t

Aaron Simpson Feb 20, 2012

Nah, I understand perfectly fine. Suspense is building up and building up and just when it seems the scale is about to become larger, the story ends. I get that complaint quite often, so don'tfeel like you're the only one missing the entire point. There a

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